This invention relates to an electronic timepiece having a plurality of alarm functions for different alarm times.
Recent electronic timepieces have been greatly advanced in versatility, and those having alarm functions and timer functions are in use. Regarding the alarm function, it has been in practice to permit a monotone sound at a predetermined frequency or a predetermined piece of music to be produced at the arrival of an alarm time. However, the monotone sound or piece of music produced as the alarm sound is fixed, i.e., predetermined by the manufacturer, so that it sometimes fails to meet the taste of the user or the user is soon bored. Another difficiency is that the alarm sound does not inform of what has to be done at the alarm time, and therefore the user himself or herself has to memorize the scheduled content for which the alarm time is set.
It has been contemplated to record the scheduled content to be done at an alarm time as message, for instance in a tape recorder, and operate the tape recorder to reproduce the recorded voice message at the arrival of an alarm time. However, the provision of the tape recorder increases the size of the device and is impractical.
It has been also contemplated to record a message in a memory within the timepiece by operation of a keyboard or the like and cause the message to be displayed on a display section at the time of arrival of an alarm time. However, this not only requires many operating keys but also the display section has to have a construction capable of displaying characters, for instance a dot matrix construction, which is undesired from the standpoint of the size reduction.
This invention is intended in the light of the above affairs, and it has an object of providing an electronic timepiece having a plurality of alarm functions for different alarm times, in which externally coupled voices as messages for different alarm times can be recorded and reproduced at the time of the corresponding alarm actions so that the user can hear the given messages at the corresponding alarm times.
It is another object of the invention to provide an electronic timepiece, which permits recording of a comparatively long voice message as well as a short voice message without need of unnecessarily increasing the memory capacity.